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Comment by dclowd9901 | Hacker News Reader

Lol $1-$5. Even hunting through record stores, I never find stuff that cheap. That might have been 2 decades ago, but not anymore.

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I was about to say the same thing. I get decent albums in somewhat not great condition at flea markets in the $5 range, but most record stores aren't selling anything that cheap these days. Everyone has discogs and can see what things are selling for and set their prices accordingly. And I'm okay with that. Everyone needs to make a buck.

I like to collect music and have been building a library of certain genres. I had been buying a lot of vinyl over the last few years but recently I’ve been getting back into CD’s in a big way because of how cheap they are second hand. Like you say, a couple of decades ago one could pick up a stack of second hand vinyl for next to nothing and the current market for second hand CD’s really reminds me of those days. For example, I picked up a recent album I’d been after on CD, second hand, for less than 10% of its price on vinyl (again, a second hand copy). The disc arrived in excellent condition with detailed sleeve notes and photos, plus it was a remaster so probably sounded better than the vinyl copy anyhow and is potentially more durable. I get the aesthetic appeal of vinyl of course, but gazing at that disc as I slotted it carefully into the player, made me think what a fascinating artefact a compact disc is too.

> ... made me think what a fascinating artefact a compact disc is too.

They are!

And compact disc have a great thing going for them: 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is basically where it's at. Sure some are going to say you need 88.2 / 24 bit or whatever but IMO the creation of the CD audio format in the late seventies / early eighties was a stroke of genius. 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is my endgame. I'm totally fine with it since my first "portable" CD player (was weighting a ton) in the late eighties up until today. And it's going to be sufficient until my last days.

I don't need "more" than that.

Nowadays I don't listen to my CD directly: I rip them to FLAC and listen mostly to my FLAC files (my car takes WAV or mp3, not FLAC though, so I convert my FLAC to mp3 for the car) and, rarely, I listen to a CD (weirdly enough my car still has a CD player).

I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing. And I don't care if they start failing: I legally own bitperfect archives.

I love to own my music.

I still cannot believe that the first documents describing the CD format came out in 1980... That's 43 years ago.

> 16 bit 44.1 kHz stereo is my endgame

> I don't need "more" than that.

> I'm stockpiling on CDs while they cost nothing

I'm with you regarding CDs, but 16 bit 44.1 kHz is only sufficient if you have good playback hardware (like a good DAC).

If not, a lower-end DAC can give more accurate audio reproduction just by throwing more data at the problem. For people who don't own/store their music but just rent/stream it, going to higher that 16 bit 44.1 kHz makes sense.

Think like screen resolution and text: displaying text shouldn't be that different in 1080p vs 4k. However, due to the algorithms use for scaling that also smooth the pixels at the border of each letter like ClearType (https://www.howtogeek.com/28790/tweak-cleartype-in-windows-7...), the higher resolutions get an advantage unless you use an old fixed-size font.

It's roughly the same with audio: if you use CDs as a source for your FLACs, get hardware a good DAC and the difference is unlikely to be perceptible. Use your ears and experimentation.

Try charity shops and annual rummage sales. I can always find a bunch of good records there (classical mostly, but other stuff too) here in the Netherlands between the dozens of boring records for prices going from €2 down to €0.50. I like the serendipity of getting some record that looks like it might be nice for a few cents.

The Dutch charity shops have a lot of immemorable stuff though, as you said - a lot of classical (dime a dozen), Dutch artists, German stuff, and the well known pop artists. But never anything rare.

You don't find anything rare because the volunteers at those charity shops get first dibs on everything (officially or no), and the shops themselves do; they will pick out the good record and either flog them on ebay or whatever, or move them to a more upmarket shop where the name changes from a charity shop but a vintage or antique shop.

I never expect to find anything valuable or collectable at a charity shop anymore. I mean besides the staff, there will always be people scouring it at all hours of the day looking for collectibles.

The other one there is house clearings; in some cases, when someone dies with no relatives or nobody interested, they'll hire a house clearing service, who also get first dibs on anything valuable or collectable. The rest is sold in either their own shops or sent to a charity shop.

It's not always that bad (though often); it depends on the shop. Rummage sales are better: the people organising them tend to not filter out books or records as a rule (church rummage sales in particular are good), because those things were donated explicitly for the purpose of selling them for some benefit, and reselling second hand stuff isn't their core business anyway.

This is how I got my really nice copy of 'Switched on Bach'! I couldn't believe my luck. Still can't.

Still waiting for that chance… It's niche enough that it won't automatically be taken out, like a Beatles record, but still famous enough that a lot of folk would grab it and head over to the volunteer manning the cash tin, red-faced with shame and stammer: “So uhm, €0,75 / 50p / 75¢ per record, right?”.

I would be looking over my shoulder all the way home to make sure I got away with it. :)

What am I missing? A pressing for this album can be had in Discogs for $3 in VG/VG condition?

I don't think you're missing anything except for maybe that (1) I'm in the Netherlands, (2) a million of these were pressed, many of them low quality (this is fairly common with high volume records, essentially there was a strong incentive to run the negatives past their 'best before' date to meet production quota spending as little money as possible because the occasional million seller was a real money maker for the record companies), (3) that what lists VG/VG may not be the same thing once you get your hands on it and that sending records of unknown audio quality or issue internationally is always a bit of a gamble. So I was very happy to find a very good quality early pressing for pennies. The state of the sleeve left me doubtful about the state of the record but it is as good as it gets.

Interesting tidbit I had held on to a record player for years to be able to digitize LPs, finally got rid of it (and the nice audio card that I used because it was no longer compatible with recent motherboards) and sure enough, within a year I find a whole slew or extremely rare Dinu Lipatti LPs and EPs (which have since gone to a pianist who also frequents HN because I think his is by far the better home for these) and that Wendy Carlos record as well as some other really nice ones. So I doubt I will ever play it, but still I'm super happy to have found it.

Looking at the Discogs offering now, I must say that I do see a surprising number of sellers in the Netherlands for this specific record, a number even offering near-mint condition. I did expect the usual problem of "$X plus $35 shipping and lots of annoyances with customs", but it seems to be much better than I expected.

Let's see what shows up :) Pressings can be wildly different. Also: beware of reissues, it was reissued several times.

What's the concern with reissued copies? More wear on the negative?

Possibly remastered (so different sound), possibly much later negatives made from the positive (positives wear too, a positive master for a million seller is a very precious thing (see below)). Far less valuable. Usually much thinner than the earlier ones so more prone to warping if not stored very nicely.

And if you're very unlucky it was made through an intermediary set of positive/negative.

The stuff that was dollar bin fodder 15 years ago is now $25 in mediocre condition. Insanity

Estatesales dot net, my friend.

Walk in on the last day of the sale, an hour before close, "fifty bucks for what's left of the records", walk out with six crates of vinyl.

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